Smart Cubes

June 21, 2011

Fitted with three-axis accelerometers and short-range wireless transceivers, these blocks can sense the location of other blocks and recognize when they’re being moved. This makes their color displays well suited for games. Pushing two blocks together might let a game character jump from one screen to the next, or shaking a block could make it generate tiles for a puzzle game in which points are scored when the blocks are arranged to form a particular pattern.